c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

KORAPHAKIA, CRETE _ I drive across the totally dark countryside of the Akrotiri Peninsula, a mushroom-shaped area whose western side outlines the Bay of Chania and eastern side towers over Souda Bay, a protected deep-water port.

I am in the mood for what my wife calls”comfort food.”I am glad to see bright lights inside Taverna Irene, one of the few outlying restaurants still open after the tourist season’s end. I discover Irene and several helpers setting up two long tables for a birthday party.

I suspect I am intruding on a village celebration, but in language beyond words, Irene shrugs off my hesitation and motions me to a side table for my dinner. Her gracious act of hospitality sheds light on the biblical notion of”settling accounts.” If this is life as we know it _ work, fellowship, family, village, kindness, festivals, languages _ what does it mean to”settle accounts,”as in the parable Jesus told about a landowner who entrusts money to his servants and returns later to settle accounts? On what basis are some praised and one condemned for being”wicked and lazy”?

Is settling accounts an individual process, in which each person will be held accountable by such measures as how they treated their neighbors, how they put their God-given capabilities to work or how they treated strangers?

Is accountability more communal than that, a process perhaps by which a village, say, is judged by its web of relationships, its contributions to larger communities? Some seem to believe that entire nations are uniquely loved by God.

Maybe, as some devoutly hope, accounts will be settled according to religious conformity. Or some human approximation of holiness. Or certain acts deemed worthy of the righteous. Whatever the prize, some will receive it and others won’t, and religion defines the rules.

Jesus’ parable talks in terms of earnings. Maybe the wealthy will be as blessed in the afterlife as they have been in this life _ with perhaps a final screening to filter out those who attained wealth in an unseemly manner. I doubt that the parable is a simple extolling of profitability, despite the language of settling investment accounts. But who knows? Maybe God does favor free-market capitalism, as some believe, and the measure for God, as for the marketplace, is return on investment.

The Scripture would support virtually any assertion of what accountability means: crushing one’s enemy or loving one’s enemy; rejecting the unclean or embracing the unclean; hewing closely to orthodox tradition or casting aside orthodoxy; leaving home or staying home; being ambitious or being humble. Take your pick.

After all these years of writing and preaching from Scripture, you’d think I would have my internal landscape populated with certainties by now. But I seem less filled with answers than ever. I know that the strident assertions of religious orthodoxy sound less and less convincing to me.

How could God possibly care how we define Eucharist? How could God have any stake in our organizational charts or hiring practices or institutional survival? Did God smile when Lutherans and Roman Catholics formally concluded centuries of bloodshed by finessing a certain awkwardness of language, or did he shake his head at their solemn press releases and absence of shame?

If, as I suspect, accountability before God is a fact but religion’s defining of the rules is merely an accident of history, then we come to this starting point: that our lives mean something, not only to culture and economy, but to God.

I say”starting point,”because the assertion that our lives mean something isn’t accepted by all people. Witness our self-destructive and other-destructive behaviors.

I return to Irene. When a club back home hosts, say, a birthday party, it likely closes its doors to others. Irene, on the other hand, sees a foreigner who has sought refuge in her village taverna and finds a plate of food for him.

Somewhere in that small transaction lies a clue, I think, as to what God looks for in settling accounts.

AMB END EHRICH